DINNER DIALOGUE. Conference on the Future of Europe

On 4 February 2020, the Bertelsmann Stiftung, together with the King Baudouin Foundation and the Open
Society Foundations, organised a DINNER DIALOGUE in Brussels. The topic that evening was the Conference on the Future of Europe and how to meaningfully involve citizens.

The Appellate Body Crisis and WTO Dispute Settlement Reform

Strengthening rule enforcement at the WTO is crucial for the organisation to maintain its relevance. This includes updating the functioning of the Appellate Body. This paper summarises the main recommendations of our other publications on dispute settlement and Appellate...

Reform of WTO Working Practices

Reforming WTO working practices can increase the efficiency of the organisation and raise its attractiveness to its members. This paper summarises the main recommendations from our other publications on reforming WTO working practices.

Bolstering International Cooperation on Subsidy Policies

Industrial subsidies are a major source of trade tensions among WTO members. Cooperating internationally on how to deal with industrial subsidies, improve transparency and create common disciplines would defuse many of these conflicts. This paper summarises the...

WTO Dispute Settlement and the Appellate Body Crisis

Recent survey evidence and proposals made in long-running negotiations to improve WTO dispute settlement procedures illustrate that many stakeholders believe the system needs improvement. The Appellate Body crisis could have been avoided but for the use of consensus as WTO...

Europe's Coherence Gap in External Crisis and Conflict Management

External interventions to mitigate crises or end conflicts have rarely succeeded. The EU and its member states, in particular, have repeatedly run up against their limits in the civil wars in Afghanistan, the Congo, Libya, Syria, the Sahel region and Yemen. However, the EU –...

A Fading Institution

In 1995, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded, much was expected of this new forum. However, 25 years later, the WTO has not lived up to these great expectations, as an analysis of media coverage over this period shows. Since the mid-2000s, the intensity of...

EU-Asia trade and investment connectivity

Global economic trends over the last decades have steadily increased the links between Asia and Europe. For both regions, a growing economic interdependency represents an opportunity to build strong, fair and sustainable relations. Nonetheless, constant global economic...

We Humans and the Intelligent Machines

Defeat cancer before it develops. Prevent crime before it happens. Get the perfect job without having to know the right people. Algorithms turn long-wished-for dreams into reality. At the same time, they can weaken solidarity in healthcare systems, lead to discriminatory...

Chasing Efficiency

The report examines how in the face of vast pressures on their asylum processing and reception operations, EU Member States adopted a range of instruments to address long-standing structural weaknesses to their asylum systems and sheds light on a number of innovative...